Monday, April 13, 2009

Easter Weekend

I always think of Easter as the real beginning of spring. Even though I don’t celebrate it as a religious holiday, the eggs and chicks and bunnies speak to me of new beginnings and the cycle of life. This year we didn’t have any family gatherings (nobody bothered!) so T-Man and I just hung out at home. It rained nearly all day but just before sunset we got this interesting light on the cherry blossoms across the street:

EasterLightWith the dark clouds behind it looks somewhat eerie, don’t you think? Yes, the cherry blossoms are finally in full bloom, several weeks late but lovely nonetheless. We have lots of them as street trees in our city. Their beauty is short-lived but really spectacular.

Backing up a bit, on Friday we took the old VW van out to a garden shop where we had lunch and bought several new plants for the garden including replacements for my dearly departed rosemary and some of the creeping thyme planted between the garden path stones. Then we went to the stone yard and bought some more of those to continue the paths. They had a sale on with 60% off on glazed pots so we got one for the new rosemary, which is a prostrate variety:

RosemaryThat way we’ll be able to move it into the greenhouse over winter to give it more protection. Rosemary is a bit iffy here. Most winters it will be fine but every so often we have one that’s too cold and it can lose branches or be killed entirely. That’s what happened this year. The lady at the plant store said that nearly everyone lost their herbs: rosemary, sage, and thyme. I did lose the first two but not all of the thymes although some survivors show damage. We’re still waiting on several of our other shrubs to see if they can be saved or are toast, particularly a couple of the rhododendrons and our old firethorn. Sniff! That was so pretty with it’s red berries in winter. The birds will miss it as much as I will. T will not miss it’s thorns however. He has issues with thorny plants. He’s very happy that he’s nearly finished replacing the back fence where the blackberries have being doing their best to hinder his progress. And they’re just the heavily pruned canes and barely showing new growth yet.

In crafty news, I finally finished a secret spinning/crochet project which I have put into Ravelry but have not mentioned it here. I’ll wait until Thursday to blog it since it will be gifted then. Just in case the recipient is reading. Don’t think so but you never know! Nice to have actually finished something for once. I keep pegging away at things but it doesn’t seem like there’s much progress when it’s scattered around 3 or 4 different projects.

1 comment:

Asylim said...

That's funny. We were (Nicole, Stuart, Lea, Pat and myself) commenting at Pat's place on Sunday that it didn't feel like Easter this year and we all remembered going to your place last year.

So much going on these days I guess.